Marketing is used to encourage an audience to take action. Marketing can generally be divided into three categories: owned, paid, and earned. Owned marketing refers to advertising that is owned by the marketer such as the marketer's webpage, blog, or Twitter account. Paid advertising refers to instances where payment is made to leverage a channel not owned by the marketing entity. Classical examples of paid marketing are paying for a bill board display, sponsorships, and internet display advertisements.
Earned advertising refers to instances where the customers themselves become the marketing channel. Earned media includes word-of-mouth advertising, buzz, and “viral” media. Earned media is often the most credible of all marketing tools and plays a key role in most sales. In many instances, the distribution of earned media is from person-to-person through pre-existing relationship channels. This lends a superior level of trustworthiness to the communication. Earned media often is a result of well-executed owned and paid media. However, earned media has a reputation of being hard to scale, difficult to control, and challenging to measure. Customers can be unpaid or paid for generating earned media.
Social media has emerged as a key medium for marketing and plays a particularly significant role in earned media. Social media includes interactive platforms that allow individuals, businesses, and communities to create and share content. Social media technologies include blogs, picture sharing, video blogs, wall postings, email, social websites, instant messaging, music sharing, crowd sourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.